


A Room Is Not A Home

by Angel Ascending (angel_in_ink)



Series: The Mighty Nein Go To The Beach! (Critical Role Relationship Week 2018) [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: A Bit Of Backstory Speculation, A little bit of angst, A little bit of fluff, Background Beau/Jester/Yasha, Beach Episode, Critical Role Relationship Week, F/F, Is It Breaking And Entering If It's Your Old Room?, Jester's Mom Really Does Love Her, Yes I Do Make a Reference To The Lady Of Shallot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-23 22:49:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14942846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_in_ink/pseuds/Angel%20Ascending
Summary: It was a vacation, and a much needed one. There was food and drink whenever they wanted, cabanas and hammocks set up in a row well above the hide tide line, and the air was filled with the smell of salt and beach roses and the sound of the wind in the beach grass. And despite all that, Beau was already restless.“Hey Beau,” Jester whispered in her ear. “Are you awake?”Oh thank fuck. “Yeah. Couldn’t sleep.”“You know what we should do?” Jester’s smile was bright in the dark. “We should sneak into my old room.”





	A Room Is Not A Home

**Author's Note:**

> I set this premise up at the end of "With Your Words For Company I Won't Ever Be Lonely," but that's not required reading. All you need to know is that this is set during some time in the future when it's safe for Jester to visit her mom in Nicodranas. 
> 
> Special thanks to @cinwicked for coming up with the title, and to my friend @herbertbest for trying to help me come up with a title and putting up with my needless anxiety about it.

Beau stared out at moonlight over the water, the gentle motion of the hammock and the sighing of waves almost enough to lull her back to sleep. Almost. It felt weird to be sleeping outside and not having to keep a watch. She had known it felt weird to Caleb as well, she had seen him fiddling anxiously with his silver thread just before he had turned in for the evening.

“We’ll be fine!” Jester had assured him. “The beach is totally safe! No one’s seen fish people or tentacle monsters on it ever or anything!”

“Good to know,” Caleb had said, but it was Fjord that Beau had been looking at, because she was almost positive that the half-orc had flinched when Jester had mentioned tentacle monsters. Fjord hadn’t been in the water once since they had gotten to the beach, but then, the man had been almost drowned (Beau wasn’t entirely sure about the _almost_ part) at sea, she could understand if actually getting back into the water might be something he wasn’t entirely keen on.

Beau shifted slightly in the hammock and Jester made a sleepy noise of protest, her tail curling just a little bit tighter around Beau’s leg as if to keep her in place. Jester had alternated between sleeping with Yasha and Cali and Beau while on the road to Nicodranas, and tonight it had been Beau’s turn. It would probably be unfair, not to mention unsafe, to slip away and do a little night swimming.

Not like there wouldn’t be plenty of time for swimming in the morning, or during the week. They had only gotten to Nicodranas that morning and Jester had been a bright blue streak of nervous, chattering energy the whole time, so excited to be home and to be able to show her friends everything and to see her mom, who had met them all on the private beach at the bottom of the tall cliffs where The House stood. The brothel had a name, something classy that subtly hinted at what might go on behind the doors, but both Jester and her mother had called it The House, and so did everyone else.

Marian Lavorre, her skin as red as rubies and her horns a graceful spiral, had been everything Jester had said she was, charming and kind and beautiful. The first time the woman had laughed Beau had recognized where Jester’s own laugh had come from. Beau had watched her closely as everyone, including herself, had engaged the woman in conversation, and everything about her seemed genuine. She really did love her daughter, really had missed her terribly, and was so very proud of the woman her daughter was becoming. Beau hadn’t been able to help thinking about her own mother, an emotionally distant woman who had sat passively by when her husband and her daughter had shouting matches over breakfast, and had always looked at Beau with a faintly bemused expression, like Beau was a puzzle she just couldn’t understand.

Fjord had taken Beau aside later and had thanked her for not calling out Jester’s mom on the fact that she had kept Jester shut up in her room for most of her life.

“I said I wouldn’t,” Beau had said, arms crossed over her chest sullenly. They had agreed before they arrived, out of Jester’s hearing, that none of them would bring that up unless Jester did. They didn’t want to ruin this trip for Jester, or to hurt her, and Beau had agreed as easily as everyone else had. What she didn’t tell Fjord was that, in a brief moment of jealousy, when Jester and Marian had hugged, she had _wanted to._ She had wanted to hurt someone so badly that for a second she almost hadn’t cared _who_ would have been hurt. She had almost fucked everything up. Jester never would have forgiven her.

“I know what you said,” Fjord had replied. “I just know it couldn’t have been easy for you. Hells, I don’t think it was easy for any of us. Caleb was petting Frumpkin so hard that I thought he was going to pet the damned cat’s fur clean off, though that may have just been because Caleb’s no good with meeting new people. And Molly’s tail was doing that thing it does when he’s upset, even though he sure _sounded_ throughly charmed.”

“And how about you?” Beau had asked.

Fjord had glanced over where Jester and her mother had been standing, Jester’s laugh echoing over the sand, and said nothing, and Beau remembered too late that Fjord had never even known who his parents were.

“Shit man, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” Beau had said apologetically.

“It’s all right,” Fjord had replied. “Can’t be helped.” He had looked at Beau then, and smiled, and Beau had let him think that she believed that the smile was genuine and not forced as it was. “Hey, we’re on vacation. Let’s go get a drink.”

It was indeed a vacation, and a much needed one. There was food and drink whenever they wanted, cabanas and hammocks set up in a row well above the hide tide line, and the air was filled with the smell of salt and beach roses and the sound of the wind in the beach grass. And despite all that, Beau was already restless.

“Hey Beau,” Jester whispered in her ear. “Are you awake?”

Oh thank fuck. “Yeah. Couldn’t sleep.”

“You know what we should do?” Jester’s smile was bright in the dark. “We should sneak into my old room.”

“Why?” Beau asked. “We’re going to see it tomorrow anyway.” Jester’s mom had promised everyone a tour of The House in the morning, before any clients were scheduled to arrive. Beau had seen Nott’s eyes light up at that, and she wondered just how much of the brothel’s decor was going to end up in one of Nott’s collections.

“Well yeah, but that’s with _everyone_ ,” Jester whispered. “I mean just you and me. C’mon, it’ll be fun to sneak into my room! I used to do it all the time!”

Beau returned her grin. Well, she had been feeling restless, and sneaking into Jester’s room would at the very least not be boring, and of course there was the added thrill of it being something they were not _supposed_ to be doing. “Yeah, all right! Let’s do it!”

Jester gave Beau a quick kiss and clambered out of the hammock so fast that the sudden shift in weight almost caused Beau to fall out the other side. The tiefling was practically bouncing as she took Beau’s hand and lead her across the sand, her bright pink bikini practically a beacon in the dark, not that Beau’s own swimsuit in bright almost turquoise blue was any better a color for sneaking around in. Beau had been surprised to learn that there were _clothes_ made just for people to swim in, but Jester had made sure to inform everyone of that fact when she had dragged them all shopping earlier that afternoon. For Beau, swimming had meant sneaking out to the pond just past her parent’s vineyards, and her swimming attire had been whatever underthings she had been wearing, or nothing at all if she had been feeling particularly daring.

Jester picked her way up the cliff path with ease, and not for the first time, Beau wished she could see in the moonlight and in the dark even half as well as Jester did. Still, Beau managed not to stumble even once, and soon enough they were in front of The House, which didn’t loom any less for being closer to it. If anything, the mansion (for it _was_ a mansion) seemed even more sinister up close, all dark wood, the glass windows with lights shining out of them looking like nothing less than the watchful yellow eyes of some predator. Beau shivered.

“C’mon!” Jester whispered excitedly. “First we go up the magnolia tree!”

Beau looked up at the tree as Jester climbed up the trunk and into the branches as fast as any squirrel. The tree was tall, with broad leaves and large flowers that smelled sweetly in the warm air. Beau quickly swung herself up on the lowest branch and hurried to catch up with Jester, slipping once and only just managing to swallow a loud curse as she caught herself. She found Jester about midway up the tree, perched on a stout branch as easily as if she were a bird.

“Okay,” Beau said. “Now what?”

“See that rose trellis over there?” Jester pointed, and Beau could make out the shape of a latticework against the side of the of the building about five or so feet away. “We just jump onto that and climb all the way up to the top! Don’t worry, the roses don’t grow this high anymore, though Momma said they used to, when I was younger. It’s all very mysterious,” Jester said with a wink, and then she leapt off the branch and onto the trellis, climbing up a few feet before looking back down at Beau.

Beau wondered if Jester had somehow done something to the roses or if the Traveler had, but at the moment all that mattered was that she wasn’t going to get her bare feet full of thorns. She edged out to the end of the branch and jumped, catching the rose trellis easily.

“Good job!” Jester loudly whispered, and then she was climbing up the trellis, her tail swaying a bit as if it was helping her keep her balance. Beau couldn’t see exactly where they were heading, but she had to admit that the view of Jester from the angle she was at was very nice indeed. She paused when Jester did, watching her fiddle with the latch on a small, round window at the top of the house, and then Jester slipped inside. Beau followed, wiggling through the small window and landing on the floor absolutely soundlessly.

“Wow, you looked so graceful just then,” Jester said, no longer whispering, her tone teasing. “Have you had practice squeezing through pretty girl’s bedroom windows, Beau?”

“Oh sure,” Beau said, thinking about her brief stint with breaking and entering even as she made sure to keep her tone strictly in the vein of friendly sarcasm. She tried to look around but all she could make out were dim shapes in what little moonlight came through the window. “Every night a different house. Shouldn’t we be keeping our voices down?”

“Oh, no one can hear us in here,” Jester said. Beau heard her footsteps against the floor as she moved away from Beau. “It’s soundproof. All the rooms are, pretty much. Though sometimes, if I listened _very_ hard against the door, I could hear Momma sing. I should ask her to sing for you guys, her voice is _amazing._ ” There was the sound of a drawer being opened and closed, a faint rattling and then the faint rasp of a match being struck as Jester lit a lamp.

Beau winced and shielded her eyes for a moment before managing to look around the room, trying to hide her surprise. When Jester had mentioned that she had spent most of her time in her room, Beau had imagined it more like something out of a fairy tale, one of the ones where the princess was kept in a small stone room with hardly anything in the way of furnishing. She should have known better. The room she was standing in was large, with dark wood floors broken up by bright pink rugs and walls that were filled with drawings and paintings. There were bookcases filled with books, an easel with a half-painted canvas resting upon it, and shelves and shelves of dolls which stared at Beau with glass eyes. There was a desk covered with paper and several jars of ink, and Jester herself stood by a vanity with a tri-fold mirror, the light from the oil lamp she had lit reflecting off the glass. There was more to the room that Beau couldn’t see in the light from just the one lamp. Her own bedroom at home hadn’t been half as large.

“It’s pretty great, right?” Jester asked, her tone tinged with desperation, as if she was trying to convince Beau or maybe herself that everything was fine. She walked over to the bed, large enough for four people easily and covered in frilly pink pillows that matched the pink bedspread. She sat down and Beau sat next to her after moving some of the pillows out of the way. “I mean, it’s way better than like, you know that story about the lady who was cursed to never be able to look outside except through a mirror, and all she did all day was weave tapestries or something? I had way more stuff to do than that. It wasn’t bad, really, being in here most of the time. Sometimes Momma would take me down to the beach when it was dark and she wasn’t busy, and we’d have picnics and collect shells and okay, sometimes I was a little bit lonely and I wished I had some friends to play with. I mean, the Traveler showing up was great of course but he wasn’t, you know, a kid or anything.“

Jester’s voice wavered, and Beau felt her heart lurch. Jester sounded like she was about to cry, and when Jester was sad it made Beau feel like there was something wrong in the world, like that spell Fjord used with the darkness and the tentacles. She thought about Jester’s mother, who had kept her daughter in this room like a bird in a cage. It may have been a large cage, and a fancy one, an aviary rather than a birdcage, but still a cage. But then, wasn’t Jester’s mother confined as well? Beau had seen the prejudices that tieflings faced, having travelled with Molly and Jester for so long now. Could she blame Marian for keeping Jester hidden so that she could keep her clients and provide for Jester the only way she knew how, rather than face the uncertainty of what the rest of the world had to offer? 

“Beau, you are having serious thinking face going on.” Jester leaned over and kissed Beau’s furrowed brow. “You okay?”

Beau thought about their first nights traveling together, how Jester had been so excited to have a roommate, to have someone to share secrets and giggle with in the dark. No wonder Jester hated sleeping alone now, if all of her nights previous had been spent in a silent room in this vast ocean of a bed. “You know what we should do?” Beau asked suddenly, the idea coming into her brain so fast that it was as if the Knowing Mistress herself had placed it there. “We should sneak up here again before we leave, you and me and Yasha and Cali and Nott, if she wants to join us, and have a proper sleepover.”

Jester grinned so widely that it seemed that the top of her head would come off, sadness fading from her eyes. “That’s a great idea, Beau! We could have snacks and tell stories and do each other’s hair and stuff!”

Beau smiled back, pleased that she had made Jester happy. She couldn’t change how her past affected her, just like she couldn’t change Jester’s own past, but she could at least help Jester form new memories of her old room, have it be no longer lonely and and instead filled with laughter like the singing of birds.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm angel-ascending over on Tumblr if y'all want to stop by and say hi!


End file.
